Healing Streams
Members and friends of The Community of Aidan and Hilda who live in the area have begun a Forty Days of Prayer for Whitby. For its first week I stay in a cottage linked to the Sisters of the Holy Paraclete at their St. Oswald’s Centre at Sleights, and join them in morning, evening and night prayer. During the day I get to know the churches, pubs, trails, properties and even gyms of the town. One day I pray in St. Hilda’s (Roman Catholic) and next day share in the Eucharist at St. John’s (Anglican); they tell of plans to open up as a ‘market place centre’. I hope to join the Churches Together prayer meeting and meet the owner of Simpson’s Whitby Jet shop, and The Dispensary Network with its vision of co-operatives .On Sunday I shall join Whitby Christian Fellowship which meets in a school.
While here a USA author friend has emailed me a most amazing draft of a vision story in which he meets ‘the apostle John’ on Patmos Island. John, who understood that the root of all is the eternal relationship between divine Father and Son. John, the apostle of flowing tenderness with whom those in the Celtic tradition have such an affinity. In my friend’s vision story the myriad independent churches of Protestantism become a myriad dead flies. Why? Because they assumed Jesus was outside people and it was their job to get people to ask him in. They never realised that Jesus is inside people, and that it is their job to help us all recognise this, and embrace our common relationship with God and one another that this implies.
The vision story inspires me to compose my daily prayer tweet: ‘Teach us that the womb of the cosmos is the relationship between the Father and Son within God’.
Two phrases may be keys to the vision for Whitby: Healing Streams and Village of God. A river flows through the middle of this bustling, characterful little Yorkshire town. A river flows through a city in John’s Book of Revelation. Trees grow on its banks whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.
I am content to be just a little leaf.
